


Separation

by telekinesiskid



Category: Steven Universe (Cartoon)
Genre: Body Horror, Death, Mercy Killing, POV Second Person, Psychological Horror, Self-Harm, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-19
Updated: 2015-09-19
Packaged: 2018-04-21 12:10:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,718
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4828652
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/telekinesiskid/pseuds/telekinesiskid
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You don’t know what to make of it. You’ve lost focus and your pink shield has sputtered out of existence, and it’s all you can do now to back away and watch, mouth agape, eyes wide, terror coming hard and fast like someone’s trying to push you off of a cliff you’re not even standing on.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Separation

**Author's Note:**

> More fuel for the nightmare machine!!!
> 
> The gf and I both did cluster stories and her one is [ here ](http://archiveofourown.org/works/4828640) <3

You don’t know what to make of it. You’ve lost focus and your pink shield has sputtered out of existence, and it’s all you can do now to back away and watch, mouth agape, eyes wide, terror coming hard and fast like someone’s trying to push you off of a cliff you’re not even standing on.

It’s…

Handsy. That’s what it is.

It’s made of different-coloured hands. A tangle of uncoordinated limbs.

It’s fast. It’s strong. Garnet’s close combat; she doesn’t hit back hard enough and suddenly it has her. It pulls her apart like she were warm softened clay, and you’re thankful that gems bodies are just illusions or you think you would be watching blood pool in it’s many hands right about now- flesh dropping to the floor in wet, shiny clumps. Slick hot gore over your floorboards.

It doesn’t stop. It comes for the others.

It comes for you.

No one can take it out. Even Pearl and Amethyst are afraid to get near it now, and even without the stunned-stupid and sickened internal horror as their biggest hurdle, neither of them are confident enough to act without Garnet’s instruction. They decide they can wait. The best you can do is cordon it off. From everybody.

You wish you could cordon it off from itself.

 

When it dies – not by the gems’ hand but it’s own – it reforms. It always reforms, thoughtlessly, even more instantaneously than Amethyst on her bad days. Bubbling it doesn’t help. It doesn’t care. It tries to reform and shatters the mould, dies again in the process, but it doesn’t care. It wants out. It wants space.

So you and the gems put it in a secure room. You give it… distractions.

It works for now.

 

It wheezes and whines and wails- discomforting in the day, hellish at night. It’s a living cacophony. A discordant being. It screams like every second of its existence is agony and- God, you’re not sleeping tonight, you’re just not.

You can’t believe there are more of these things out there. Just the existence of one is enough to make you feel sick as you lie awake and try not to think about it.

 

Garnet doesn’t come back.

Ruby and Sapphire materialise a few days later but they don’t fuse. They say in careful, composed monotones that they’ve talked about it – face to face, two minds and not one – and they’re going to spend a little time apart. Physically, mentally, emotionally- in every way that they can. They don’t even stay in the same room together for very long before one or both of them finally leave after minutes of silence and staring wide-eyed at walls and always fidgeting, fidgeting, fidgeting, _fidgeting, fidgeting, FIDGETING-_

You don’t understand the implication at first. You don’t understand that neither Ruby nor Sapphire will help the monstrous creature. Garnet would always act, and Garnet is made up of both Ruby and Sapphire, so…

So why can’t Ruby and Sapphire do something?

Why won’t Pearl or Amethyst do something?

 

You can’t sleep.

You keep watching it.

The only thing it can agree on is separation. The only thing it’s calm enough and half-concordant enough for is dissection.

You used to think it just liked to trash the place and break everything in sight but you’ve managed to stop silently screaming at the sight of it enough to study it and its habits. It’s not destroying- it’s _dissecting._ It’s disassembling every little thing, piece by piece.

Even the things that don’t want to be disassembled.

You think you’re so lucky that you’re not in there with it right now.

It’s many hands grapple onto a chair and you watch with petrified fascination. The hands still fight – they always fight, they always shove, they always shudder with the force of trying to push each other _away –_ but the body- the _palm_ manages to curl around the piece of furniture and every hand – finger? – latches on and grips tight and yanks the whole thing apart, breaking it down to its bare components. One green hand tears off the plush seat in chunks of fabric and cotton. A yellow hand wrestles the back off. A blue, a red, a purple, and pink seize all four legs of the chair and quarters it. Sturdy wood snaps off like twigs.

It doesn’t stop there. The four legs are snapped in half. That’s eight legs.

They’re all halved again. That’s sixteen.

And again. That’s…

You can’t count. You can’t keep track of them, they-

They keep going.

Sawdust snows, and splinters and wood shards stick out of every arm, hand, and finger. It fumbles with bigger, sharper shards and uses them like stakes against the other, it swipes for them, it fends them off, it deflects blows, it…

It stops.

It turns the makeshift weapons instead on it’s core, it’s centre, it’s palm full of eyes and teeth and fingernails and crystal shards that look they were melded, crudely stuck together with a hot glue-gun, like a kid’s ugly art project. It stabs and it wails and it misses its target- it impales eyes, it pierces through and guts the place that has no guts, and it pounds and punches and senselessly beats down on it’s own discoloured flesh like it wants to be _free_ of the prison that is itself.

You want to step in. You want to put it out of its misery. You want to help it.

One hand punches through the flesh. It finds the gem shards and it curls its fingers around it, shaking, shaking, screaming, shimmering velvet blood running down its arm, dripping like acid and sickly maple syrup to the floor-

There’s a flash of smoke and white light, a puff of cool air. By the time you look back it’s just the cluster shards on the ground.

You think it’s safe to go in there now.

Your feet stop just short of it. It looks so still and peaceful on the ground, in its natural unnatural state. You still don’t know how this gem stuff works; you don’t know if gems are still sentient beings inside their stones or if they just lie in wait until they can project their image and interact with the physical world. You don’t even know if gem shards – just splinters of who they used to be – still have the same… functioning. As whole, undamaged gems do.

You think of Amethyst and how she was when her gem was cracked. And that was only a cracked gem.

You wonder what kind of quality of life that is. To be in constant pain and constant revulsion with yourself, to dread the materialisation of your new form, fit for a traitor and a rebel. To maybe one day look across the way and spot one or more of your arms flailing desperate off the back of a grotesque _monster_ and know that you must look like that too.

No. You…

You can’t imagine that.

You can’t imagine screaming for that loud and that long, with no mouth to do with it with. You can’t imagine a disembodied hell that you share with several other people, fated to spend the rest of eternity together, screaming and _screaming_ for help, pulling everything – even yourself – apart in your wake because it’s _not right_ and you just want to _separate._

Someone has to do it.

You hope that they want you to do it.

That’s why they dissect. Because they want to be dissected too. You don’t believe they wanted to hurt anybody.

You don’t have much time.

 

You’re crying already as you head outside. You find the sturdiest rock you can and it strains all of your muscles to carry it back inside, but you manage somehow. It’s not just strength you’re working off of; it’s your determination too. It’s your compassion. It’s your internal strength.

You hope that you’re doing the right thing.

You stand over the crystal shards. Your shoulders tremble with the weight and the fear but you get the rock up over your head and you suspend it there for a few seconds, still allowing yourself a little time to back out, because what if…

But you saw them. You saw how much agony they were in. All the time.

Not even your mom could’ve healed them.

You clench your eyes shut before you drop the rock and you actually feel the floor judder beneath your feet when it hits. But you know it landed in the right place because you heard it die. You heard it sharp in your ears. Like crushed glass beneath a truck tire.

You shift the rock out of the way. Tiny bits of multi-coloured crystal adorn the wooden floorboards that your rock broke in a little. But it’s ok. You had to do it. You just had to. You couldn’t let it suffer anymore.

You try so hard to keep your lip from quivering as you carefully scoop up the little pieces, thirty or forty or so of them. It was a good crush. Everyone’s nice and separate now. Even from themselves.

You don’t bubble them. You take them outside and run down to the beach. You stand on the shoreline to stare at the pale periwinkle glow on the horizon. You hope this final resting place will do. The ocean’s a nice spot. The ocean is a key feature of Earth after all.

You look at them in your palm and try not to sob. You would’ve liked to get to know them. These were all your mother’s friends, her allies. These were the fallen gems who died for a cause that was bravely fought and won, thousands of years ago. These were good gems, who didn’t deserve the atrocities inflicted upon them.

You tell them that you’re sorry.

You tell them that your mom would’ve been proud of them.

You keep your eyes open this time. You draw back your arm and fling the little glittering shards through the air. They rain down on the salty waters in a long streak and the waves eat up all signs of them. You toss them around until every last bit of them is settled in the sand of the planet they sacrificed themselves for.

You hope they’re finally at peace.


End file.
